e borne in mind in considering England is that it is
an island, that its people are insulated. An excellent thing to
remember, too, in this connection, is that England is a flower garden.
In ordinary times, after an Englishman is provided with a roof and four
meals a day, the next thing he must have is a garden, even if it is but
a flowerpot. They are continually talking about loveliness over there:
it is a lovely day; it is lovely on the river now; it is a lovely spot.
And so there are primroses in their speech. And then they have
inherited over there, or borrowed or stolen, a beautiful literary
language, worn soft in colour, like their black-streaked, grey-stone
buildings, by time; and, as Whistler's Greeks did their drinking
vessels, they use it because, perforce, they have no other. The
humblest Londoner will innocently shame you by talking perpetually like
a storybook.

One day on an omnibus I asked the conductor where I should get off to
reach a certain place. "Oh, that's the journey's end, sir," he
replied. Now that is poetry. It sounds like Christina Rossetti. What
would an American car conductor have said? "Why, that's the end of the
line." "Could you spare me a trifle, sir?" asks the London beggar. A
pretty manner of requesting alms. Little boys in England are very fond
of cigarette pictures, little cards there reproducing "old English
flowers." I used to save them to give to children. Once I gave a
number to the ringleader of a group. I was about to tell him to divide
them up. "Oh, we'll share them, sir," he said. At home such a boy
might have said to the others: "G'wan, these're fer me." Again, when I
inquired my way of a tiny, ragged mite, he directed me to "go as
straight as ever you can go, sir, across the cricket field; then take
your first right; go straight through the copse, sir," he called after
me. The copse? Perhaps I was thinking of the "cops" of New York.
Then I understood that the urchin was speaking of a small wood.

Of course he, this small boy, sang his sentences, with the rising and
falling inflection of the lower classes. "Top of the street, bottom of
the road, over the way"--so it goes. And, by the way, how does an
Englishman know which is the top and which is the bottom of every
street?

Naturally, the English caun't understand us. "When is it that you are
going 'ome?" asked my friend, the policeman in King's Road.

"Oh, some time in the fall," I told him.

"I